My cable tie addiction got a reality check from a guy at IKEA

I was at the IKEA in Portland last Saturday grabbing a new desk top, and I saw this older guy looking at the cable management trays. He saw my cart full of zip ties and velcro straps and asked what I was building. I told him about my plan to bundle every single cable under my desk into neat little groups. He just laughed and said 'you're gonna hate yourself every time you need to swap one thing out.' I didn't get it at first, but he walked me over to his cart and showed me how he uses small pieces of velcro on each individual cable, then bundles them loosely with a single big strap. That way you can pull out one cable without undoing the whole mess. I had been wasting hours retying everything every time I added a monitor or charger. Has anyone else found a trick that saves them time when they need to swap out a cable?

2 comments

2 Comments

beth_ward8012d ago

That old guy at IKEA just saved you from a lifetime of cable hell lol. I learned the hard way after spending 3 hours untangling a mess because I needed to swap out my monitor cable. Now I label every single cable with a little paper tag and wrap each one separately in velcro before bundling. Makes swapping things out feel like a superpower instead of a punishment.

davis.mia12d ago

Feeling like a superpower instead of a punishment" - that's exactly it. I stopped trying to be fancy with zip ties and just use bread bag clips with a sharpie now. Takes me maybe 2 minutes to label a new cable, saves me 30 later.